ADAM AND DAVE 29.97
Aug 29, 9:30pm at the Royal Cinema (608 College). $8 at the door.
Unfortunately, this year’s Toronto International Film Festival Short Cuts Canada program won’t feature a new film by Knock Knock (Who’s There?) Comedy! members (and former EYE WEEKLY cover boys) Adam Brodie and Dave Derewlany. But Friday’s one-night only event at the Royal will give viewers who missed such past TIFF triumphs as The Wrong Number (man vs telephone), True Love (man and woman vs Cupid) and The Racist Brick (can’t spoil this one, sorry) the first a chance to catch up.
The screening also includes the well-travelled webcam spoof Strip Show (featuring Rebecca Addelman as a spectacularly addled online submissive), several episodes of the pair’s “Unreel Sports” series (detailing such trivial pursuits as “pool pool” and “naked co-ed ping-pong”) and the demo pilot for Fact Up, “an uneducational educational TV show” produced with fellow Knock Knock members Katie Crown and Aaron Eves. Adam Brodie took some time out from preparing 29.97 (the name apparently refers to the frame rate of video in North America) to exchange some informal emails with EYE WEEKLY.
Do you think that screening your films back to back in a retrospective format (such as it is) reveals any deep or subtle themes that we might have missed the first time around?
Similar to Wizard of Oz and Dark Side of the Moon, we noticed that if you play all our films back to back, they line up perfectly with Alien Ant Farm’s second record truANT.
What would you say is the Adam and Dave filmmaking ethos?
Ordinary people in extraordinary situations with a surprise twist three quarters of the way through. Wait, that’s M. Night Shyamalan. I guess we are the comedy version of M. Night Shyamalan, except there are two of us and we haven’t had as much box office success — or colossal failure.
You two recently did some online spots for Telus. Is it stifling to create comedy for the corporate sector?
We still have a surprisingly large amount of blood in our veins from our time spent doing comedy with corporations. The thing is that the corporate sector seems to consistently have all the money. But generally, ideas get 37 per cent less funny whenever they come in contact with people dressed in expensive clothes sitting in office boardrooms.